The New York Stock Exchange. The violin. The Sun3 computer system. Radio. What do these four have in common?

Harris Skibell.

Skibell is currently Composer-In-Residence at Brooklyn College's Center for Computer Music. He is using the Center's Sun3-based direct digital synthesizer system to organize the sounds of the New York Stock Exchange and the violin into a 26-minute composition for public radio's New American Radio series.

Reflecting on this curious association, Skibell says, "I guess being an outsider, a musician, I wanted to use the violin to combat the Exchange, or deal with it. And then the idea just grew from there, from the opposition between what is represented by the Exchange and what is represented by the violin."

And what is represented by the violin is a certain notion of art. The violin has its own culture, Skibell points out, a culture derived from the character of the instrument and from the literature that is always defining and redeeming it. It has an aristocratic aura. "To me," he says, "it is the icon of European art music. And it;'s associated with the virtuoso -- most notably Paganini -- who in turn conjures certain ideas about what music is. The great virtuoso is inseparable from his instrument, completely immersed in his playing. So to be convinced by him is to be seduced into this separate world of music, with its own values, rules and limitations." The Exchange, on the other hand, lies at the heart of the everyday world. "It's a powerful American symbol," Skibell says, "of the world whose business is business, where profits and the bottom line rule. At least on the surface, that seems antithetical to the world of the violin."

But as Skibell thought more about it, the distinctions began to blur. "It's not that easy. The relationship between the two worlds is complex, and I don't propose to encompass all of it. I'm trying to get to something beyond them both by taking them out of their literal context. I'm thinking of other relationships, like mapping the ups and downs of a market onto musical structures -- drawing similar abstractions from two similarly mathematical worlds. Or pitting the violinist's virtuosity against that of the brokers -- so that you hear this intense work going on in two different ways." It became Skibell's idea to challenge the notion of two worlds. But even more importantly, it was his idea to make music from the widely disparate sound elements of the violin and the Stock Exchange.

With a commission from the New American Radio series, Skibell approached Brooklyn College's Center for Computer Music, which already had a history with radio. Charles Dodge, its director since 1977, has created a number of exceptional works for the medium, and it has a visiting composer program. The initial months of Skibell's residency were devoted almost exclusively to learning how to use the Sun3, a large, general system that supports a number of software programs from different research centers -- CSound from MIT, CMix from Princeton, and CARL from the University of California at San Diego -- and that allows the user to mix the various resources they offer. "It's a less intuitive way of working than the way I used to work," Skibell says. "My primary experience was in the analog studio, where I worked in a kind of improvisation -- splicing tape, twisting knobs, multitracking, etc. in real time -- so I could make decisions as I went. But here I must conceptualize what I want before I act -- so that I can tell the computer how to produce sound or process a source sound. That's involved some reorientation."

Under the guidance of the Center's Technical Director, Curtis Bahn, himself a composer and performing musician, Skibell has learned to do a number of things involving complex digital filtering to analyze and process his sounds. Sometimes he uses banks of 5000 or more filters at one time, all precisely tuned and controlled. "I guess I have four or five tricks up my sleeve now," he says laughing. "I'm using comb filters that ring in certain frequencies in reaction to a sound source. I've been feeding the Stock Exchange sounds into them. You can still tell they're sounds from the trading floor but they have a pitched quality. And I'm doing subtractive synthesis -- applying multiple digital filters to trading floor sounds and closing them down to get string-like sounds. I'm using that as a way to establish a continuum sonically between the world of the Stock Exchange and the world of the violin.

"I'm also using the phase vocoder, which is one of the packages from CARL, to stretch sounds so that I can either use them on their own or feed them into other processing units. And then I'm using the phase vocoder to analyze sounds for resynthesis. I recorded the opening bell at the American Stock Exchange and wanted to separate it from the background noise of the trading floor. So I analyzed the component frequencies in the bell and then used a digital instrument design by Jean-Claude Risset to resynthesize it from scratch. That's something I couldn't have done with any other kind of system.

"While I talk about all this stuff I'm doing with the computer, I'm also writing out music for the violinist. This is a performance oriented piece and you know that is one of the most exciting things to me about it. I'm thinking of it as a kind of concerto for violin and NYSE AMEX Orchestra. I'm writing it for the violinist Rolf Schulte. He's especially committed to new music -- he's premiered pieces by Milton Babbitt, Tobias Picker, Georgy Kurtag and Mario Davidovsky. But he also is involved in the more traditional solo literature of the violin. And that whole continuity and tradition is what interested me for the violin part in this piece. So I'm very excited and honored to have the opportunity to write for him."

Exchange will be a dialogue between two powerful symbols from the worlds of commerce and art. Skibell says that he's inviting the listener to say, "What the...?" when confronted with the dual subjects. And to that question, he says, "the music of Exchange is the only answer."